Time change has impact on health

By Ry Clarke - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on March 11, 2023.

It’s that time a year again – you get to lose an hour of sleep Saturday night because of Daylight Saving Time.
Daylight Saving begins Sunday and though modern-technology does the hard work for us, don’t forget to set that annoying oven clock forward one-hour Sunday. This time of year, we lose an hour as the clocks jump ahead – spring is for springing forward, as the old adage goes.
While there are perks to the process with light longer into the evenings and lower energy use, there are downsides to DST as well, besides losing an extra hour of sleep.
Mental health can be affected by the seasonal change with experts noting the increases in sleeping issues, mood changes, and increased risk to our general awareness.
“You have a clock in your brain, it is roughly 24 hours, and it continues to cycle. It is deep inside your brain, and it’s tiny, around 20,000 neurons. This tiny area has a huge influence on brain and body function. What it’s doing, like a conductor, is basically coordinating functions in our body and brain at different times a day,” said Robert McDonald, professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge.
“At different times of the day, different parts of the brain and body need resources, and at other times they don’t. A key part of that is light, the clock is set by light.”
McDonald notes our internal clock can be affected by factors in our life, the social-clock.
“The problems arise when that social time, or societal time, is being misaligned with our natural body time,” said McDonald.
“With Daylight Saving, which lasts from spring to autumn, your social clock is one hour earlier than your body clock.”
When our body is subjected to change, like Daylight Saving, the effects can cause troubles for us.
“Springing forward causes things like sleep disruption, affects productivity and it can have many negative health impacts,” said McDonald.
“One thing that happens during the spring forward is there are more car accidents. We believe this is because people are tired and their cognitive systems are not working as well. There are also more heart attacks, workplace accidents, and strokes.”
McDonald says the change lasts with us for six months of the year when we go through constant changes. “If your circadian system has never been able to set, it takes weeks for it to recover from a reset,” said McDonald.
“Your circadian system becomes totally dysregulated; it can’t keep up.”
Rather than a mean-time standard, experts recommend standard-time synchronisation.
“There was a vote on whether we would go to full-time Daylight Saving, or whether we would continue to switch back and forth from daylight savings to standard time. Both those are terrible choices – what the vote should have been on was whether or not we go to standard time,” said McDonald.
“Going full-time Daylight Saving is the worst; you are constantly going against your biological clock, switching back and forth. I would say there’s a general consensus in my field that standard time would be the best.”
There are ways to help curb the cause so we can stay ahead of the change.
“Having a regimented schedule, we believe, is better for your clock. Getting up at the same time, even on weekends. The clock is very sensitive to when we eat as well. Eating late at night, and foods that aren’t particularly good, or snacking can rest the clock, too,” said McDonald.
“What we are finding in our work is that some people are very resilient to these kinds of perturbations of the circadian system, and other people are extremely sensitive to them. We are all on the continuum, with things like age, male and female differences, and people with different chrono-types.”

2
-1